Auxiliary Instrumentation:  

While using any of the above detector systems, auxiliary electronic equipments such as a high voltage (HV) supply, linear or spectroscopy amplifier, pulse height analyzer, timer-counter or scalar units are required. HV supply must be of high stability and amplifier must have high sensitivity. The signal output of a detector is often quite small and is likely to be lost if directly carried through amplifier. Therefore, the signal is fed through a preamplifier to avoid noise to go the second stage amplification. As there is significant amount of cosmic radiation from natural radioactivity and other radioactive sources in the laboratory, the detector is invariably kept inside a lead shield 2" to 3" thick where background is decreased considerably. It is essential that the scintillation or semiconductor detector system should always be recalibrated using standard sources.

All the modern instruments have display and spectra recording facilities along with software for peak identification, peak area calculation and calculation of elemental concentrations.